Kate Westbury: The Oxford Guide to Scandal and Lies
Debut
Set in Oxford in 1951, this delightful first novel features an opposites attract type couple, Ginevra Bishop and Simon Braithwaite. Bishop, Gin to her friends, is a well connected redhead familiar with the upper crust boys who have joined her at Oxford. Simon Braithwaite, on the other hand, is a clever working-class veteran damaged by the war who has come to the campus in order to escape his ghosts (what we would now recognize as PTSD).
At that time, the after effects of the war remained inescapable, with both the student body and the faculty staffed with war veterans, all of them struggling with their own nightmare memories. As the book opens, Gin, searching for a study spot in the crowded Bodleian library, asks her favorite librarian, Tolliver, for a tip, and ends up next to a hostile and inhospitable Simon. Meeting cute, the two glare at one another over the top of their research tomes, and so far, so cozy. It’s only when Simon and Gin discover the body of sweet old Tolliver at the moment he’s drawing his final breath that things take a slightly darker turn. It’s murder, and the pair are soon recruited by British intelligence.